[Blog Post] Peter Bakker on the VMS

[nickpelling]

Aha! I need to be more precise! Before 1500, spaces were sometimes removed (as in the Steno cipher you correctly flag), but were never concealed, and were never inserted for steganographic or deceptive purposes.

That is, if someone showed you a ciphertext where every word was exactly five letters long, you should be able to conclude that it was not made before 1500.

Similarly, if (as with the Voynich Manuscript), you look at a pre-1500 text or ciphertext with spaces, there is no reason to think that the spaces are anything but word separators.